Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Neptune-Pluto and the Dreamtime

A few weeks
ago I was told in a dream that we are continually imagining the world into
being. Sounds about right to me. It’s Neptune.

On an
everyday level, it’s like when you clearly intend something and it happens. It
doesn’t always happen, but it still does happen more than you’d think, and you
can feel the connection with your intention when it does. I think it works when the intention comes through us, is deeply felt, rather than being thought up. It gets
called the Law of Attraction these days. But I prefer to think in terms of
dreaming or imagining. Or even praying.

And it’s the
same on a metaphysical level. Life (Pluto) is continually intending the
universe (Neptune). That’s why science has got stuck in its progress at the
quantum and galactic levels – the ‘irrationality’ of the former, and the
unknowability, 96% dark energy – of the latter. It has come up against the
limits of treating something like it’s separate and ‘out there’ when it’s not:
the universe we see is profoundly connected to the human mind, on a level at
which we find it hard to be aware.

So the basic
power in the Universe is Pluto. He is the power behind both life and matter. He
is that basic power in us that takes over when we just need to survive. He is
what makes us keep wanting to live – and if in some ways when you’re honest
with yourself, and there’s a feeling of I’m not sure I want to be around, then
there is a Pluto challenge, that is where you can find your soul (Neptune). You
don’t fight the feeling, you go into it and see what it’s saying.

And this
basic Pluto power intends, dreams the Universe and it happens, perfectly and
immediately. Neptune is both the intention and what is dreamed into being, and
they are the same thing. This is really how Evolution happens. It clearly does
happen, look at all those DNA connections and physical similarities. But forget
about natural selection and mutations and competition that takes billions of
years. It’s not that. Life forms dream themselves into being, continually, and
new forms can arise very quickly because this dreaming process is very
powerful. But it is life itself doing the dreaming, so there is a wholeness and
beauty to it, what science might call a balanced ecosystem.

The closest scientific
mechanism to this dreaming is the discredited Lamarckism, the inheritance of
acquired characteristics, where you need eg a longer neck, and you could say it
is dreamed into being collectively for the next generation.

Perhaps our
job as humans is to make that dreaming conscious, which is why we are hit and
miss at it, and why we even forget about it. It’s a remembering of how the
whole show works, and in doing so we make it conscious. In one form or another,
it seems to be present in all indigenous traditions.

But it is
not something willed, or that we can control very much. When I hear people like
Melinda Gates saying their children can be whatever they want to be, I think no
it’s not like that, there’s all sorts of hidden pressure in there to become
something, it’s not the freedom she is presenting it as: ‘The American Dream.’

It is more
like the universe dreams us, and our job is to become conscious of that and
live it. It is a deep thing, it connects us with what is most fundamental and
powerful in life. Another way of saying it is that the astrological chart shows
the way archetypal forces, the gods, are each and together making claims on us;
the chart is a map of that dreaming.

And I think
we can spend most of our life as a preparation for that sort of deep dreaming connection – if
indeed life has that in store for us. It’s not our decision. In ‘The Shaman’s
Body’ Arnold Mindell (founder of Process Work) says: “Parapsychological and alternative medical powers appear regularly as
part of the development of the shaman but are… considered secondary to the
overall development of the fluid, or flexible seer, whose goal is to live on a
spiritual path.”

Exactly
(though I don’t go much with the word ‘spiritual’). This is what is not
understood very well in our culture. You so often see it, people who have a bit
of a feeling for homeopathy or shiatsu or astrology or being a medium or a
shamanic healer or a psychotherapist and they go off and do a few years
training and get a certificate and they are off out there practising it and for
so many of them it becomes their identity (Mindell again: ”None of the shamans I have met identifies himself as such the whole day
long. The word shaman.. refers to one who works only part-time as a spiritual
guide and healer”.)

And it
becomes their identity because they have not had the decades, yes decades, of
learning not to have an identity in that ordinary way. Where life keeps taking
it away from you until you get the point. I’m always banging on about this when
people are having major transits and can’t carry on as normal and feel bad or
inadequate, and I say this is a major part of the transformation, you are
having to live outside of the conventional tags that give you an identity, and
conventional people may indeed think less of you for that, and it’s not easy,
but learning to live with that really deepens you and gives you insight.

Professionalism
is the curse of the modern-day healer. If you’re a professional you’re supposed
to know the answers and have the trainings and certificates and straight teeth and
brush your hair and have a well-designed web page and all the rest of it, and
if you’re an accountant then that’s fine and necessary. But the best healer may
appear a shambling mess who turns up late and who is happy to say I don’t know.
Or maybe they appear quite ‘professional’, but that is a disguise if they are
good. Professionalism is about having a respectable identity, it’s not about
being a ‘fluid seer.’ I’d go so far as to say that such people, who may be in
the majority, don’t do much real good, in fact may do more harm than good. Most
psychotherapists I have met don’t have much natural insight into people, though
they have plenty of words and professional empathy, and their training is no substitute for that
insight. (The archetypal psychologist James Hillman was of the opinion that
psychotherapy has done more harm than good.) But it doesn’t have to be like
that. (This is the point at which I lose several subscribers!)

But back to
where I started: my dream where I was told that we are continually imagining
the world into being. A scientific ‘proof’ would be to consider the brain, and
how much we take for granted in a deep structural sense – space and time, up
and down, me, the world ‘out there’, left and right, up and down – all are a
creation of our brains. Even the brain itself is such a creation. The brain is continually manufacturing, or dreaming
our reality.

And I think
this is a basis for a whole philosophy, a whole way of looking at the world.
And it has a fluidity built into it. And the astrological chart is a way of contemplating the
universe’s dream of you at the moment you were born.

On a collective level, there is also a dream. And it tends to possess the collective, like a dream will possess the unconscious individual. Again, you can probably see it in a national chart. In the UK, with our conflicting dreams of equality and hierarchy/royalty, you see it in Sun in Capricorn conj IC, square to Uranus Rising in Libra: the Angularity makes the dream that much more powerful.

A collective dream can change, and that is where individuals come in, with a powerful dream working through them that engages their collective. Like Margaret Thatcher, with her Saturn Rising in Scorpio (purging 'dead wood' in an uncaring way) conjoining the UK 2nd House (economy) Neptune (she attracted worship and hatred in equal measure).

But though that connection was powerful, and she could fight to the death, I think that collective dreams, and changing them, have their limitations. For we are not dealing with dreaming that is particularly conscious by individuals who have, through long preparation, stepped out of an ordinary way of defining themselves, into something much more fluid, the kind of fluidity and creativity (Uranus) that belongs to Neptune and the Dreamtime and where, in a sense, all things are possible.

7 comments:

diastella
said...

thank you for this - such a timely reminder that all my 'failings' do not diminish my growth nor scatter my focus - I know this within me and for the work I do with people, but still, I am human and struggle when I forget my dreamtime.

Reading this post on Pluto, I found the Eris Pluto Ceres post, then discovered my natal Ceres and Pluto are opposite, creating a Tsquare to Moon Uranus in Aries. Checked Eris ephemeris and learned she was at the point of the Tsquare (and a yod as well) when I became a prominent feminist office holder in 1969.

With the current new moon and Mercury Sun conjunction, all the above is lit up.

I agree that Eris is a goddess of war and conflict, A WOMAN SPURNED, before she threw the apple into the party.

What do you think of her as a goddess seeking recognition who probes the unconscious for healing for her sister Ceres, the earth mother?

It is precisely the imaginings of the mass culture that concern me. The perpetuation of the violent gory male avatar in a shiny hard-edged future reality. Always served by some handmaiden and accompanied by some idiot sidekick. And now scientific technology is sold as the key to life everlasting as a borgdroid. God save us all from the wet dreams of 14-year-old boys and the old men who bank on them. I do agree about the most psychotherapists and astrologers but have to say Freudian comes to mind when I consider the trend of current 'reality'.

This gives a better explanation of the outer planets' influence on our lives than anything I have found anywhere else. I appreciate this deeper insight into what makes us tick right along with the Universe. At the same time, I have so many questions.

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Barry Goddard

Astrology has its roots in ancient augury, in reading the intentions of the gods. It contains truth, but not in a literal, scientific way. It is a way of thinking, natural to human beings, that has been largely forgotten today. An astrology chart cannot be ‘read’ like any other text: rather, the astrologer uses the stars and planets in a ritual way that allows his or her intuition - the daemon, the gods, the unconscious - to speak. And the emphasis is not on foretelling the future but on how to live well, what attitude to take to life, how in other words to live in accord with the intentions of the gods. I mainly do readings by skype. If you’re interested, email me at bwgoddard1@aol.co.uk. I was born 12 Feb 1958, 18.50, London